Cracks in the Wall (China Internet)

Forbes ^ | Feb. 27, 2006 (pub date) | Richard C. Morais

[RightGeek]

With engineering help from half a dozen Western firms, the Chinese Communist Party has erected a huge apparatus to censor free speech. A ragtag crew of hacker dissidents may succeed in tearing it down.

In a windowless room in New York City, a computer engineer with owlish glasses--call her “Jenny Chen”--peers at a color-coded bar graph on her PC screen. Her group is launching attacks on the Chinese wall of censorship that blocks access to sites discussing verboten topics like civil rights and democracy. The graph displays how many Chinese that month evaded the country’s censorship to condemn the Chinese Communist Party.

Chen, a Beijing-born woman of about 40, runs her own it businesses. Her group, and like-minded “hacktivists” (as they call themselves) spread around the globe, are chipping away at the Golden Shield, the term that describes the filtering system that censors the Internet and e-mail of China’s 110 million Internet users. The invaders slip contraband words and ideas in and out of the country via such means as mass e-mails, proxy servers that aren’t yet blacked out and code words that aren’t yet on government blacklists.

Arrayed in battle against the hackers are the Chinese Communist Party and an assortment of Western firms that provide the hardware, software and search services that make the Chinese Internet run: Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo. These companies are in a bind. They cannot do business in China except on terms dictated by the Chinese authorities, and that means zapping Web traffic that strays too far from the party line. But if they comply they become, in the eyes of Chinese dissidents, collaborators with an oppressive regime.

The Internet firms will get a chance to squirm in public on Feb. 15, the day Representative Christopher Smith’s (R–N.J.) invitees are to appear before his Global Human Rights subcommittee to answer questions about their operations in China. Given their public statements to date, the U.S. firms are likely to say something like this: We must comply with local laws; we think it’s better for Chinese citizens to be getting filtered access to the Web than none at all; and we hope for more openness in the future.

Sure to come up: the case of Shi Tao, a reporter for the Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) of Hunan, who forwarded, ultimately to foreign Web sites, his account of political directives to Chinese journalists forbidding the coverage of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Paris-headquartered free-speech advocate Reporters Without Borders, citing court records, says Yahoo’s subsidiary fingered Shi by handing Chinese authorities the digital fingerprints of Shi’s e-mail. The evidence led to the journalist’s ten-year prison sentence last year.

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Remarkable what a little suppression can do to turn a small disgruntled group into a large, angry mob. Consider the history of the religious movement Falun Gong. Unexceptional on its face, Falun Gong looks to outsiders like a cross between tai chi and Buddhism. But about seven years ago the Chinese authorities decided that, with 70 million adherents, it had become a threat to their rule. The police began a campaign to imprison and torture the sect’s practitioners. It made the believers into martyrs.

Now Falun Gong is the focal point for a whole dissident movement. The practice is, appropriately, a postmodern religion that operates in the digital world: It has never had significant church real estate nor run formal fundraising activities, but is driven entirely by volunteers organized over the Internet. Now expatriate members are all over the world, bombarding their homeland with e-mails, chat rooms, phone calls and faxes. Many but not all of these messages randomly list multiple proxy Web sites that can be used to slip through the Golden Shield to access news and information from the Free World. These ever-changing proxy addresses rain down on China at such a furious pace that the Internet police can’t blacklist them quickly enough. Some proxy addresses last only minutes before they are obsolete, others several days. Some use encryption (of the sort used to protect charge card numbers) to thwart the censors. “The amount of information going into China is staggering,” says Alan Adler, a Tenafly, N.J. businessman who raises money for this hacking effort through a nonprofit outfit called Friends of Falun Gong.

UltraReach Internet Corp. and Dynamic Internet Technology are just two commercial American companies moving information back and forth through China’s Golden Shield for Falun Gong and other news, human rights and U.S. government organizations. UltraReach is press shy, but monthly traffic statistics we’ve seen suggest its proxy Web sites averaged 2 million visits and 460 million hits a month in 2005.

Dynamic Internet Technology of North Carolina got its start with a pilot project for the U.S. government in 2002 and today discreetly claims on its site that it offers customized, low-cost and reliable Internet solutions “under challenging circumstances.” Voice of America and the New York-headquartered Human Rights In China are also DIT customers. William Xia, DIT’s chief executive, claims “hundreds of thousands of regulars” use its services daily.

But DIT and UltraReach are just the tip of the Falun Gong’s hacking efforts. “We never put all our eggs in one basket,” says hacktivist Chen. “We work from multiple places, use many different systems and technologies, and we back each other up in many different ways. We’ve learned this the hard way.”
 

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[RightGeek]

Excerpted. Nice of the Internet biggies to help out the Chinese Communists. Glad to see it's not working.

[Wuli]

We need to start a campaign to demand that Intel, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, MSN and any other US technology firms in China share, with this hacker group in NY, the technical means with which those firms assited in China's censorship and in fact, they should be helping to fund this group.

[adorno]

The graph displays how many Chinese that month evaded the country’s censorship to condemn the Chinese Communist Party.

I wonder which major internet players like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc, will help the Chinese figure out who amongst the Chinese were able to receive any unblocked internet communications. Once the Chinese figure out who they were, you can be sure that they'll be prosecuted or jailed without questions. But, Google, Miscosoft or Yahoo won't care.